Government Failure: Hurting our Veterans

But we can’t honor them while ignoring how they’re mistreated by the nation they served.

In April 2014, there was a scandal over veterans dying while waiting for healthcare. The veterans were put on fake wait lists, signed up for ghost clinics, and their records were manipulated.

Deceit had to be used to cover up leadership failures in the bureaucratic, inefficient Department of Veteran Affairs.

The consequences: veterans suffered and died.

It is now a year and a half since this happened….. and nothing has changed.

800,000 records and applications for healthcare enrollment have been delayed in the VA system.

307,000 of those veterans have died while waiting for their application to be accepted. They weren’t even in the system!

This same recent investigation also revealed that a veteran who died in 1988 still had an unprocessed application in the system – 26 years later.

Veterans deserve quality healthcare that is accessible to them when they need it. They have earned that.

It’s tragic that they are so neglected. And it’s time to actually change this.

The VA has a budget of $160 billion annually and was given an extra $16.3 billion in 2014 to offer more healthcare options. Instead of using this money to give veterans more healthcare options, the VA made it practically impossible for the veterans to get healthcare at all.

This is what happens with massive bureaucracies: they become tremendously inefficient – and even corrupt – and they cannot be changed because it is impossible to hold them accountable.

Giving this bloated, unethical bureaucracy more money to address problems does not help. The money is only misdirected, misused, and wasted. It’s time to downsize the bureaucracy that is robbing veterans of the care they deserve and come up with better, alternative solutions.

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Why are we doing this?

For decades, the Republican Party and other organizations have focused on the handful of swing districts they thought were “winnable” or favored establishment candidates.

Because of this strategy, the Republican candidate in hundreds of districts is just a name on a ballot, abandoned and unable to spread a message about common-sense policies to the people who need to hear about them most. Activists in those districts are left without a cause to rally around, and voters are left without a real choice.